Audio recordings of the London lectures are now available – just click on the links on the left. They cost £5 each or you can get all three for £12 – bargain!
We are sorry to announce that due to unforseen circumstances Kristin Aune is no longer able to join us for the lectures.
We are very pleased to announce that Jenny Baker from the Sophia Network will be taking her place and we look forward to hearing her input.
We apologise for any disappointment.
We will be adding Jenny’s biography to the website shortly.
‘Once upon a time I believed in a great many things. Now I believe only in a few things, but I believe them more deeply than I ever thought possible. That God is, that God is love, that Jesus is the Son of God – these things I believe. Everything else is up for debate.’
Thanks to Robert Colquhon for promoting the lectures on his blog and for pointing me to this article in The Times.
According to The Guardian the government are considering new legislation to restrict the access to lads mags such as Zoo and Nuts (you’ll forgive me for not making these into links). They’re running a poll asking whether or not readers agree that these publications are ‘contrbuting to the ‘drip, drip’ sexualisation of young boys and girls by the media’.
Why not vote and then comment here on what you voted and why.
That’s it really!
Follow us at RealYCML (someone got there first – rats…)
I’ve kind of held Mark Driscoll at arms length for a little while, mostly because I’d heard on the grapevine about his style and so forth. I was reading the latest missive on why the emergent church is wrong and so checked out a youTube clip of Mark explaining why he has issues with what he describes as the ‘Liberal Emergent’ Lane. What he said was reflective and graceful, and I thought that maybe I had misjudged the guy.
Then I noticed some other videos by him in the YouTube window and I listened to the clip that’s embedded below. Whilst I may agree with his sentiment and his message, I wonder whether if this is the kind of preaching that men need to hear?
Any thoughts?
Just to let you know that we have now updated Paul Fenton’s biography on the YCML website, visit the Lecture 3 page to see what we’ve written.
Just a month to go until the lectures – tickets are still available. Visit the bookings page for… um… bookings…! Rememebr you can now pay by credit card online, or by invoice; whichever is easier.
Interesting article in LICC‘s Engaging with Culture mailing exploring men and tears.
Grown men crying on TV operate, it seems, like buses – you wait ages for one, and then three come along at once. In little more than a week we’ve had Peter Andre, Alistair Campbell and Gordon Brown all welling up during interviews.
We’re well used to the pop culture celebrity circus eliciting emotionally charged responses, but it’s a less frequent sight in the dry-eyed political arena. So what prompted Alistair and Gordon’s tears? For Campbell, it was Andrew Marr’s suggestion that his former boss, Tony Blair, misled Parliament over the intelligence for going to war in Iraq; in Brown’s case, it was talking to Piers Morgan about the death of his baby daughter, in an interview to be broadcast this weekend.
What is fascinating about the media coverage is not the subject in itself – we all know boys cry – but the angle reports adopt. The press appears to want to call the tunes to which emotional displays should be set – maligning those who don’t cry when they should (cf. Luke 7:32), yet suspicious of those who do.
So it is that Blair’s lack of tears before the Chilcot inquiry is interpreted as arrogance and inhumanity, while Campbell and Brown’s tears are cynically assumed to be a show for the sake of improving the Labour Party’s media image.
Yet, Brown merely responded humanly to a genuinely emotive question. It was not a dissimilar situation that prompted the naked reportage that constitutes the shortest verse in the Bible: ‘Jesus wept’ (John 11:35). The context there makes it clear that Christ’s emotion was very public, but that far from being a manipulative attempt to elicit sympathy, his tears were bound up with empathy for the loved ones of the deceased Lazarus, whom he counted as a friend. Nor do we approach these verses cynically, for we understand that they emphasise the humanity of Christ, an example that he truly is able to identify with all that we experience.
The humanity Christ shares with us is one we all have in common – including Campbell and Brown. So perhaps we should seek to exercise a little more restraint when it comes to judging the emotional displays of others. Which is to say, perhaps we should be a little more willing to let people be human.
The expenses scandal might indicate that a degree of cynicism is in order when it comes to politicians. But should that really extend to a default position whereby a significant aspect of their very humanity is denied?
Nigel Hopper
